WARNING: Dividend Cuts Are Coming For These 3 Stocks 🚨

So, guys, one of the biggest pushbacks that you'll hear against dividend investing is that dividends aren't guaranteed. And to be honest with you, that's completely true. Companies can set dividend policies, they can talk about their commitment to rewarding shareholders, they can even have long histories of paying dividends, but at the end of the day, a company can cut its dividend at any time. The thing about dividend cuts, though, is that they don't typically come completely out of nowhere. More often than not, there are financial warning signs to start showing up well before a cut is announced. And in today's video, I want to walk through three stocks where I'm starting to see some of those warning signs show up right now. [music] Before we get into it, though, guys, in case you're new to the channel, my name is Ryan, and here we talk all about dividend investing and how you can use it to create passive income and reach financial freedom. So, if you love dividend investing and if you're on a mission to retire early, then hit that subscribe button. We are making our way quickly to 100,000 subscribers, and I'd love to have you along as we continue growing our portfolios and collecting that cash flow. So, guys, the first stock on our list today is a company called Vail Resorts, which I think is a really fun business. It's one of the world's largest ski resort operators, owning more than 40 resorts across North America, Europe, and Australia. These include resorts like Northstar and Heavenly in Lake Tahoe, Park City in Utah, and Whistler up in Canada. Now, personally speaking, I've always been an avid snowboarder. I grew up like 2 hours from Lake Tahoe, so I went to Northstar and Heavenly quite a bit growing up. And because of that, I've always been interested in owning Vail Resorts in my portfolio. It's a stock that hits close to home for me, but I can just never get past this business's fundamentals. It seems like a fun one to own, but not a great investment. So, for starters, over here on Simply Safe Dividends, we can see that sales for Vail Resorts, at least, have been growing over the past decade. We'll give them that, but the good in the fundamentals starts and ends right here. Everything else, at least to me, looks troubling. Scrolling up just a little bit, both earnings per share and free cash flow per share look pretty choppy, and both actually seem to have declined a little bit. We can see a slight downward trend here with the earnings per share going from $8.06 in 2022 to $4.40 in the trailing 12 months. That's actually quite a big decline. On the free cash flow side, this has gone from $12.80 in 2022 down to $4.88. So, once again, another pretty big decline here. And if we scroll on down to the margins, we'll see a pretty similar trend here. Operating margin has gone from 23% in 2022 down to 16% in the trailing 12 months. And the free cash flow margin has gone from about 21% all the way down to 6%. That's a huge drop. So, clearly Vail Resorts is holding on to less and less of every dollar that they bring in, which is a big problem because if they can't fix the issue by either cutting costs somewhere or growing sales more than they have been, then eventually they're going to have to free up cash somehow, and that's when the dividend can potentially be sacrificed. Now, on the dividend side of things, on the surface, it really doesn't look too terrible. For the most part, the dividend has grown quite well over the years. There was a blip right here in the pandemic years where they cut the dividend a couple of times, but they definitely brought it back with a vengeance afterwards as we can see. And you know what? Over the past 5 and 10 years, the dividend growth CAGRs look pretty good. 20% over the past 5 years, almost 15% over the past decade. That's really strong dividend growth. With that though, if we just look at the past couple of years, we see that the dividend growth has really started to slow down. And actually, if we scroll down just a little bit looking at the payment details, we can see they've kept the dividend in place at its current level since April of 2024. So, it's been over 2 years since they've raised the dividend. And that shouldn't be much of a surprise considering what we saw in the fundamentals. Even though the sales have continued growing, the profits and free cash flow over the years have been declining, which is going to put pressure on the company's ability to continue growing its dividend. Now, scrolling down a little bit looking at the payout ratios here, to be honest with you, I don't know how long the company can afford to keep the dividend at its current level. I mean, they've been paying out more than they've earned in profits over the past 3, 4 years now, and it doesn't look like that's going to be changing over the next 12 months. And they've been paying out as much, if not more than they've been generating in free cash flow, which is an even more worrisome sign that this dividend cannot be sustained. Meanwhile, as that's been happening, the company has been taking on more and more debt, the net debt to EBITDA has been going up, net debt to capital has been going up as well, and the interest coverage is just getting worse and worse as time goes on. So, with all of that said, I would not be surprised to see Vail Resorts cut its dividend at some point in the future. I really hope they don't, but to me, there just seems to be too many red flags. Even though the yield right now is looking pretty tantalizing at 5.65%, Simply Safe Dividends gives them a dividend safety score of only 20, which is terrible. And this is actually one of the things that I use Simply Safe Dividends for all the time. If you're trying to analyze a dividend stock and get a good sense of whether or not its dividend is actually safe and sustainable, this is one of the best tools out there for that. They actually publish a public track record of how their dividend safety scores have performed, and since 2015, investors who followed those ratings would have avoided 97% of all dividend cuts. If you want to check out Simply Safe Dividends for yourself, there's a link to it down in the description of the video and in the pinned comment, where you can try it out with a 2-week free trial. You don't even need to put in a credit card, just sign up with your email and see what you think. I personally think this is a must-have for any dividend investor. Now guys, stock number two on our list today is Robert Half, which is one of the biggest staffing agencies [music] in the world. They specialize in placing candidates for white-collar jobs in areas like finance and accounting, legal jobs, HR, marketing, and technology. I really hate to say it, but I'm kind of eating my words when I talk about this one. I put out a video on Robert Half sometime late last year, where I said it seemed like an interesting investment because it had gotten so dang cheap. And to be fair, since then, the share price is up over 50%. But today, I can't help but think that Robert Half might have to cut their dividend. Back over here on Simply Safe Dividends, looking at Robert Half's sales, it looks like those peaked back in 2022, and every year since then, they've seen a decline in sales. To be fair, though, this business is cyclical, so some ups and downs in the sales over the years is not all too surprising. They're just kind of going through that part of the cycle right now. With that said though, if we scroll up looking at the earnings per share and the free cash flow per share, these have been struggling, guys. They've really fallen off a cliff. Both their earnings per share and the free cash flow per share. This is not a good trend. And with the decline in the earnings per share and free cash flow per share, the margins have suffered as well, going from a high of about 13% in 2022 down to basically zero in the trailing 12 months for the operating margin. And the free cash flow margin's not much better, peaking in 2020 at 11% and now in the last 12 months it's only 4%. I will say though, while we're down here, one of the bright spots for Robert Half is the fact that they have no debt on the balance sheet. So, even if the company were to end up cutting their dividend, which hopefully they don't, but even if they were to cut their dividend, at least you don't have to worry about Robert Half going bankrupt anytime soon. Anyway, scrolling up looking at the dividend growth, historically Robert Half has actually been a great dividend growth stock. Over the past 5 years the average growth rate is almost 12%. Pretty similar over the past decade and they've actually been growing it for 21 straight years. They're very close to being a dividend aristocrat. However, if we scroll down looking at the payment details, it's been over a year since they've raised the dividend. Last time they did it was back in March of 2025 and it's been stagnant for the past six quarters. Now, this stagnation is definitely a red flag and in my opinion, it could be a precursor to a dividend cut. In fact, to me there's no way that this company doesn't cut its dividend. I guess if they really wanted to, they could lever up the balance sheet to, you know, continue paying the dividend if they wanted to do that. But as an investor in this company, I think at that point you'd have to ask yourself, do I really even want that? Do I think it's a good idea that they're taking on debt just to continue paying the dividend? I don't think so. And once again, even though the yield on this one is pretty juicy, very similar to what we saw with Vail Resorts, the dividend safety score is only 30, which is not as bad as Vail Resorts, but still pretty poor. Once again, on the bright side at least this company has no debt. That is one lever they could pull if they needed to, but to me things aren't looking too promising for Robert Half dividend. Now guys, stock number three on our list today is probably going to be the most recognizable of the bunch. This one is Papa John's, and while their pizzas may be hot, their dividend has gone cold. Taking a look at the dividend history over the years, I think this is a pretty interesting chart. The growth, as we can see, has definitely been sporadic, and it really wasn't that long ago that they were aggressively growing this dividend. Over the past 5 years, they've raised it by 15% on average. Over the past 10 years, 11%, both very strong growth rates. But we can see it's definitely stagnated over the past few years, and actually if we scroll down, it looks like they haven't raised the dividend for at least 3 years, going back all the way to August 2023. Now, like we were talking about with Robert Half a moment ago, this could be a precursor to a dividend cut, and based on Papa John's fundamentals, it seems like it's heading that way. Scrolling down, looking at the sales, they haven't budged since 2021. In fact, over the past, you know, 5 years, the sales have actually declined. So, that's not a trend that you want to see, and if we scroll up just a little bit looking at the earnings per share and free cash flow per share, we definitely see a similar trend here with the earnings per share. This is undeniably declined over the past few years, and free cash flow generally has declined as well. Although, looking at the chart, it has been a bit lumpier than the earnings per share decline, but it's still there. With that said, scrolling down, looking at the debt situation, the net debt to EBITDA has ticked up over the years. It's not in a terrible place right now, only at 3.6, but the trend is something to keep an eye on, and interest coverage down here has definitely deteriorated over the years. This is worrisome, but it's also not too surprising since the profits have declined over this time period as well. And on a similar note, look what this decline in profits has done to the payout ratio. It's taken it from a low of 33% back in 2021 to now 100% above that. In the last 12 months, it was 132%, which is crazy. And it's a similar case here with the free cash flow payout ratio. Actually, more often than not, they're paying out more in dividends than they're generating in free cash flow, and there's really only so long that that can go on. Now, like the other three companies, this one is yielding pretty close to 6%, so great dividend yield. I do understand the attraction to it based on that, but the dividend safety score, even though this is the highest of the day at 40, this is still pretty low. It's not great. At any rate, guys, those are all of the stocks that I think are in trouble right now. I definitely will not be buying them, but if you want to hear about all of the stocks that I have been buying, then check out this next video right over here. In this one, I'm telling you about my most bought dividend stocks so far here in 2026. These are the ones that I've contributed the most money to, so click right over here to find out which ones they are, and I'll see you in the next one.